DARK SOULS: if you need me i'll be in an induced coma so mvrch comes tomorrow

graphics fetishism is a big scam anyway, art direction is 90% of what makes good-looking games look good

I'm psyched to go through the contortions necessary to get a red eye orb in this game.

if people are disappointed that Dark Souls doesn't look better on switch than it did 10 years ago, that means nothing to me, cuz I've never played it before.

if anything they are complaining that it isn't changed enough. i think many wanted a remake in DSIII engine or Bloodborne engine or something. there were some rumors/fake news on that front (i think i even said something as much on ILX even, oops ;-) with most games i am a fan of playing them as designed so the lack of a visual tune up doesn't bother me. in fact i am glad it guarantees that world design, brought on by geometry and textures, go as untouched as possible. world integrity is a huge part of this game in particular so perhaps no news is good news.

the Switch might be the authentic choice as the game was designed for 30fps. game physics & combat, rolling distance, dodging, jumping distance, etc, are all affected by unlocking this framerate. with DSFix it affected the physics of the PC/Steam game. 60 fps meant your rolls & jumps weren't as long as they were in 30fps. your dodges - moves essential for combat - cover less ground. there is a shortcut in Firelink Shrine that becomes much harder to get to playing in 60fps. presumably they will fix all of this for the PC/PS4/XBX ports but who knows.

Reports of Dark Soul's performance on Switch are positive.

yeah it looked like a pretty stable 30fps from what i saw. I'll likely play it on PC though since i don't imagine it to be an ideal on-the-go game so might as well make it look super pretty

bummed for the Switch delay but i can wait a month.

more bummed that Dark Souls II doesn't work anymore! i bought it on Steam like 3 years ago and have been playing it off and on. just tried it the other day and it crashes every time i try to boot. i re-verified the files and nothing. i deleted the game, downloaded the entire thing again, nothing.

exhibit one why im buying physical for the DS remaster.

could be more than a month, they haven't given a date yet. guessing this close to release it's some supply-chain/manufacturing issue with the carts, they had the full game running fine at pax east and anything else could just be fixed with a patch

personally hoping they realised that releasing this without video capture support would be unacceptable in 2018... but yeah, it does seem like its logistics and not a code rewrite.

playing some of PTD because i never did a magic run on this. turns out is it pretty op!

going back to DSFix has been a mixed experience. 60fps sometimes but i am in Blighttown rn and it is running in the 30s when in combat w 1 or more enemies. i have no AA turned on, no AO, no advanced shading, no hd textures, just DSFix vanilla @ 1080p. it isn't quite the cure-all it has been made to be. at the first Blighttown bonfire i get 45fps.

Haha, that might as well be cut and pasted from an Autechre fan site.

Well, I know what I'm doing this Saturday.

i had pre ordered this on Switch and wasn't counting on getting it for PC. but with the long weekend coming up, and the PC port being already out (and being by a different dev that one), and it being half price since i already bought PTD, it wore down my resistance. 2 hours to go...

ok i got it. they didn't remaster the intro cg, it's the same old one seemingly. but the game looks pretty nice and is a big step up from an initial view. the lighting is very nice and the game very smooth.

only one giant problem, the in-menus are entirely hidden for me.

figured it out. the game starts with all the settings turned to 0. there is no music or sound because all the music, effects, and voice tracks are set to 0. the HUD scale is set to 0. it seem in order to get the HUD to appear you have to set it to something. lol this is the most obscure bullshit imaginable.

Man I'm glad I don't play games on pc. That sounds too much like my day job.

i really like the lighting in the remaster. like when magic missiles are shooting down a hallway the wall gets some of that blue glow. and the metal on armor and shields is nice and reflective.

also the texture filtering is really nice. in Undead Burg it looks super hd, you can see all the pores in the stones making up the ground. the animated grass is kinda cheesy but i do appreciate the lo res texture used.

tfw you simultaneously want to defend pc gaming and to toss an elitist scoff at lol this is the most obscure bullshit imaginable

i had a thing recently in witcher 1 where the skin on heads had disappeared and everyone was just a pair of eyeballs and a bleached talking jaw floating above their collars

i know i promised you guys i'd play this when the remaster came out but after seeing it's mostly just upscaling and no significant new visuals i've decided to wait on the switch version

me playing this game again is basically indefensible but i'm p sure i'm going to switch it up

Anor Londo looks good in the remaster. the walls have a porous texture similar to limestone or irl materials. they fixed some glitchy stair camera moves as well. the shiny metal looks super rad as you parry the many Silver Knights throughout the golden mansion.

it’s possible that i might never get tired of playing this game

that feeling when you first get to Darkroot Garden... i love it. still my favorite Souls forest. the fog, the green moss, the sound design, it's so atmospheric.

really like the use of motion blur, it does wonders for smoothing out the 30fps animation to look great at 60fps. w the added blur combat almost feels like DS3 at times.

I've been having a good time invading. Been doing fine one-on-one but haven't figured out how to deal with groups very well yet, at least with this build (fast roll, katana). Currently past the Four Kings and at the beginning of the dlc, but before Lost Izalith etc.

Also the enemies definitely have a larger aggro range and follow you farther than they did in the original version. I had to bail on the Garden at low levels because they were coming from everywhere, it was ridiculous. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but I'm pretty certain it used to be easier to pull one of them at a time, and that you could run by the initial ambush area without triggering it.

just beat the Duke's Archives. kind of had a realization that the area is a kind of spin on The Tower of Latria. the whole library section is kind of like the jail with the two opposing sides and the prison section has that spiraling staircase going down (Tower has them going up). what make me start making the connection was all the cthulu dudes.

oh i encountered my first vagrant! was running through Darkroot Basin and started getting hit and i turned around and there was this octopus looking dude spitting homing arrows at me. definitely a wtf moment

started a strength run too. it is way more difficult to play melee-only! the gargoyles are destroying me rn. upgrading your weapon is a must.

downloading this

i just made it to Ash Lake. this place is so wonderful. the sand looks very nice in the Remaster.

the trip through the Great Hollow was pain-free. it seems they have fixed the camera issues. i can recall several spots where i used to get caught up on the geometry & it would suddenly shift the camera in a very precarious way (this used to happen while travelling across the flying buttress in Anor Londo).

i only died once or twice on my descent.

Ash Lake is all-time. Also triggers some gamer PTSD in me.

The toadstool monsters in the Hollow are one of the better jokes in the game. Adorable... and then they punch you like a Mack Truck

gonna take me a bit to get used to the dark souls controls, every other action game i play uses X/Y for attacks. i get why its this way though, dont really want to remap them if i dont have to

but i've already died multiple times because i drank from my flask when i wanted to attack

xpost yeah the toadstool monsters are hilarious w that sucker pucnh. the wind up....and the pitch!

just defeated the Sanctuary Guardian and am in the DLC area. i love how it is clearly a version of Darkroot Garden from long ago. instead of being dark and foggy, it's bright and sunny, there's a nice garden (the moving grass looks really good here), and instead of getting sucker punched by toadstools you are having a pleasant conversation with one who is a godmother to the character you helped earlier.

there is that land bridge to the other side, which i guess in the present is that area by the waterfall. crossing that was the first time i realized where i was. Artorias fight is probably the best in the series, and im glad DS3 leans so heavily on it. the connection between him and Sif is imo the best story bit in the game.

it's funny playing this now that i have played Demon's Souls, it feels just as much a remake of that as anything. the fire dragon, the phalanxes, Patches, the gargoyles that take you to a place, the skeleton wheels, etc. so many things were present in that first entry. which is nice, it helps to have consistency across a series.

(Dark) Fantasy has always leveraged that kind of nerdy cataloging of these strange worlds. it is fundamental to the genre, in both movie/tv/comic/lit sci fi and fantasy and the real history of mythic archetypes. if you read Renaissance era magical grimoires they are full of this stuff, lists of items and lore about legendary figures. they even use the same language that modern RPGs use for elementals & supernatural beings. DS does a good job of producing its own very unique spin on Dark Fantasy and it is intoxicating.

I thought this was neat:

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--AMJkHcKO--/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/i14sumaq3uydutjreszc.png

i love that map. the world design is reason enough why this game is so beloved.

was fighting Treant Gardeners in the Royal Woods today and saw the ones with the shears just trimming trees and ignoring me.

http://darksouls.wikidot.com/local--files/npcs/marvellous-chester.jpg

Marvelous Chester is a trip. like a character from a T-Rex song or something. he's from the future? some say he is a link/hint to the future game Bloodborne.

New FROM game looks exciting, although I'm a little bummed that it supposedly won't have the now-traditional co-op/invasion system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OgoTZXPACo

yeah that game looks cool! i like how they are switching it up. i always heard Nioh was lacking in level design, which is why i never checked that out. w From and Miyazaki doing level design on this then i am in.

not gonna miss invasion, personally. lol. every time i play as a human in the Remaster i get invaded and some red idiot inevitably backstabs me as i'm fighting my way through enemies. it has made me not want to do co-op as much.

Lost Izalith has the glowing hot effects somewhat lessened. i think i am among the few who actually loved these areas and the art direction. i remember first getting to the room w Solaire by the bonfire and seeing the insane bloom. it looks like it should hurt to look at, imo it is a very immersive design choice.

Dag, Dark Souls on Switch went from a hyped prime-positioned Direct announcement to sharing a release date with the other consoles to letting convention people play it to it getting delayed with no firm date beyond a vague "summer 2018" and now apparently it's been downgraded to a generic "2018." I wonder what happened?

Quick question that I don't think I have asked before: I have a copy of Dark Souls and a copy of Bloodborne, but which should I play first? I've heard that the latter perfects (or at least improves on) a lot of the ideas of the first, but there's something to be said for starting at the (more or less) beginning and rewarding myself later with the sequels/spinoffs.

Josh just pick one and play the damn videogame

Play both in alternating sessions so you can do a comparative close reading

I've heard that the latter perfects (or at least improves on) a lot of the ideas of the first

this is inaccurate and is helping to give you the wrong impression about the relationship between the two games. they're like 2 different takes on a concept, rather than a continuation/development/improvement.

there's both great games and you can't go wrong, but fwiw i don't believe there is a consensus that bloodborne is better than dark souls

Play Dark Souls first.

They're probably as close as you can get to opposites in the series -- DS promotes a slower and more deliberate approach, BB is weighted toward speed. It would be more of a shock to adjust to DS speed after playing BB than the other way around, so I say start with Dark Souls.

Will do! (Eventually)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2tZyh4pwM0
faster pace but unmistakably a fromsoft game

Obviously going to play this, but it'll seem a little lonely without multiplayer

JIC asking the important questions so I don't have to! Thanks!